MEREDITH

A woman fondly recalls her youth during the Depression, World War II and the postwar era.

Born in 1930 to a poor couple with eight other children, Meredith Singleton, the author’s lightly fictionalized alter ego, experiences plenty of hardship growing up on a farm in western North Carolina. Nevertheless, young Meredith is “in love with life and thought the world was beautiful.” She is doted on by her parents, listens enchantedly to the “sound of crickets and katydids singing at twilight,” and basks in the miracles of nature. Coming of age in Charlotte during the giddy years after the war surrounded by friends and caught up in a whirl of dating and dancing, Meredith’s future brims with hope. When she marries and moves to Alaska, though, her life promptly goes south. She hates the lonesome, icy landscape, feels neglected by her husband Charles and pines for North Carolina. Her homesickness prompts epic road trips, but Meredith finds she can’t quite go home again–her family seems distant and uncommunicative, and her friends too preoccupied with their own broods. Meredith’s palpable bitterness is only partly salved by her faith–Fesperman (God’s Bouquet, 2001, etc.) sprinkles homespun devotional poems throughout the text. The protagonist complains of having to subordinate her needs to the demands of stronger personalities and regrets that social conventions encouraged her to pursue marriage at the expense of getting an education and a career. The unalloyed peevishness of some passages–“Had Charles purchased a decent car that was reliable, they would not have this problem”–makes decades-old wounds feel fresh. At her best, though, the author infuses the emotions and landscapes of the past with a poignant intensity.

An uneven but often affecting homage to vanished idylls.